Author: HUANG DAN 黄丹

Size: 189×94cm

Signed and dated: Painted in 2014

Estimate:

Final Price: RMB 380,000

LITERATURE
2015 Huang Dan / P86-87 / Aurastudio
sealed
EXHIBITED
2014 The Rooms, Aura Gallery, Beijing
2014 Metaphysics, Aura Gallery, Taipei
2019 Raw, N3 Contemporary Art, Beijing

Huang Dan is a painter who is best known for her contemporary use of ink wash. She refuses to be framed by the cultural paradigm of traditional Chinese painting and her art rebels against historical and cultural contexts. The painter believes that one cannot establish the new without deconstructing the old. She projects her imagination onto paper to break from any certain settled conclusions implied by the so-called language of Chinese painting.
The contemporaneity of Huang Dan’s art is manifested in two aspects: the abstract form as well as the sense of spirituality in her paintings. The former is not only achieved by discarding any representation of objects—the horses, the rocks and the pine trees– but also by avoiding fine lines and concentrating on abstracted form and mass saturated in vibrant natural mineral colors. “Spirituality” is one of Huang Dan’s ongoing pursues. Huang Dan is alert to her surroundings and she can easily empathize with the delicacy and powerlessness of individual lives. The painter is thus often overwhelmed by her intense emotions and feelings. However, she transfers those emotions onto the paper in a way that conveys a sense of tranquility. It is by depicting the tragic with the tranquil that Huang Dan celebrates the vitality of feeble lives.The opacity of mineral colors give the subjects in Huang Dan’s painting (the horses, the monkeys, the lakes, the rocks and the mountains) a sense of volume and heaviness. Vast acres of ink and cinnabar create an aggressive visual effect. Huang Dan’s paintings repel any representational meanings and become a portal whereby the artist beholds nature.In Huang Dan’s "Observing" , the shape of the horse shares the thickness of a mountain. The cut surface of the horse can be seen as a mountain or even an abyss, the undulating and winding edges of the back contain the viewers’ perception of the flesh. Huang Dan’s paintings blur the boundary between subject and object. At the same time, the physical properties of her paintings are associated with human nature, and what supports each subject is the emotional expression common to all.